Laradock VS deck

Haven’t touched Laravel for years pero baka laradock might be good for your use case

This is a function of the apache configuration files. You should examine those and determine what the issue is, using the xampp gui which will let you edit the httpd.conf file, or whatever it is that xampp uses. xampp provides the default settings you need, so I highly doubt this is the issue, but there is a directive called DirectoryIndex that tells apache what files to search for when a url points to a directory. By default that is going to include index.php. So if that is not working, then there is possibly something else going on with the apache config. To figure this all out you really have to understand how the various possible configuration options work. I don't use xampp so I can't tell you with certainty what the defaults are, but directives like Directory, VirtualHost, DocumentRoot etc, can all be used and combined in different ways to create different outcomes. For example, whether or not an index even appears (in the absence of an index.php) is configurable, as is whether or not you can override settings in a .htaccess file. I'm guessing you might be running xampp under windows, and this is yet another reason why in the era of containers, it's just better to use virtualization or containerization rather than something like xampp. As it sounds like you are still in learning mode, it's not too late to turn your attention to something like docker with https://laradock.io/

It's vastly inferior to laradock and does less.

With https://laradock.io/ it should be no more than a couple of minutes. Yes, this is a development environment and not meant for production. But so is yours, just with a worse approach.

The prime example of what I'm referring to is: https://github.com/laradock/laradock

First, we will use Laravel Sail to run the application locally on our dev environment. There are unofficial Docker environments for Laravel like Laradock but Sail is the official docker dev environment for Laravel. Sail is is a wrapper on top of docker compose.

git clone https://github.com/Laradock/laradock.git

It's open-sourced on GitHub https://github.com/sfx101/deck. Feel free to browse thru the source or download it to try it out. Any feedback is appreciated, no matter good or bad. Tyvm.

Github repo: https://github.com/sfx101/deck